I’ve been following this story for the last week or so, and was waiting for some kind of mitigating factors to pop up. Doesn’t seem there are any.

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

At this point, it’s hard to see the Nazi Pope as anything but an evil, evil man. And it’s so awesome that the Catholic church used their “moral authority” to fight against the health care bill tooth and nail just in case the Hyde Amendment wasn’t clear enough. I’ve about had it with religion being used as a justification for anything anymore. It’s of little consolation that when he’s done telling more than a billion people how to live, he’ll burn in hell for how he lived.